I’m of course talking about Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

This movie is a generational chiller.  My mother saw it in the theater when my father was off doing his national guard service, and had to go home to her mother because she couldn’t stand sleeping alone. I saw it on TV, and tried to take my shower without closing the curtain for weeks.  My husband can do a killer impersonation of Anthony Perkins smile in the very last scene.  I have forbidden him to use this particular talent when I’m in the room.

It’s actually kind of amazing that this movie still scares the bejeezus out of people.  It’s really tame by the standard of the modern thriller, not to proceeding at a leisurely pace.  There’s only one murder, and one mummified body (do I have to do a spoiler alert here for anybody?).  Not to mention the fact that the shower scene has been parodied a thousand times.

But it’s the simplicity of it that makes it work.  The story is very basic, and is, in fact the template for every modern horror movies.  A girl (a woman in this case), does something wrong.  As a direct result, she gets killed.  Her killer is pursued by those more morally upright, and, because this is actually suspense as opposed to horror or noir, in the end the killer’s caught.

But the simplicity of the plot is actually what makes it work.  It’s a spare, sturdy framework to hang the suspense on.  You know going in most of what’s going to happen, you’re constantly waiting for it.  And the suspense is killer.  Up the dark stair case, down into the basement, the casual questioning of Norman Bates by the no-nonsense detective.  He’s smart, Bates isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, but there’s a crazy with a knife out there who doesn’t have to be smart, they just have to be behind the detective.  Or at the top of the stairs.  Or at the bottom of the stairs.  Frankly, I’m surprised more people didn’t move into ranch houses after this film.  The stairs are at least as scary as the shower.

But the other thing that keeps it working is Norman Bates himself.  As portrayed by Anthony Perkins and directed by Hitchcock, Bates is a victim.  He was driven crazy.  He’s not a superman like Hannibal Lechter, or a monster like Freddy Kruger.  He could have been any kid on the block who got stuck in a lousey situation.  He could have been you.  He could have been me.  This is a human being, not a supervillain, carrying out a crime on a human scale using tools and reasoning that any of us might resort to.

Now, that’s scary.

I’ve since gotten to meet Ms. Ian.  She’s a science fiction fan and author and a really nice person.  And for the Nebula Awards this year, she re-worked “At Seventeen” into “The Welcome Home” song. This new version is also heart-wrenchingly and completely empathetic to my now former life as the fat, smart girl growing up in a white-flight suburb, but it an entirely different way.

And not in a good way. Here’s the story:

http://www.annarbor.com/news/tornado-touches-down-in-dundee-overnight-ann-arbor-hit-with-2-inches-of-rain/

Oh, and that street in the photo? I lived on that street in college.

Saturday night, the rain and the wind came down, and just as we were settling down to sleep, the sirens went off.  We did something we rarely, if ever, do, and actually grabbed our son and hit the basement.  Nothing happened but some flooding and some games of Othello on the iPhone.  So we all went back to bed.

Then it all happened again.

I actually did something I saw my father do as a kid, which was go out into the storm and look up, judging that the feel of the air and the look of the sky was as accurate as anything the news could tell me.  We had both laptops and the cell phone on to get the latest news, and stayed awake until the all clear.  It was a very futuristic storm for us old fogies.  My son just thought the whole thing was weird, and promptly fell back asleep.

I was willing to believe I’d overreacted, until the news started coming in.  Now the final total was eight touchdowns across the state.  Thirty miles south of us, houses were flattened and local businesses damaged, including an indoor water park.  Our thoughts however, are with the folks of Dundee, and my old not-much-loved but still suburb of Trenton, who were less lucky.

There are few times in your life when you really know you’ve dodged the bullet.  As I walked around our neighborhood yesterday under a sky of rainwashed blue, seeing no tree limbs down, all the houses safe and solid, and nothing worse than some blossoms squashed under all the rain, it was one of those times.

If you follow baseball at all, you heard how last Wednesday Detroit’s Armando Galarraga did what only 20 other men have done in the history of baseball, and pitched a perfect game, meaning not one single batter who came to the plate made it on base.   Except he didn’t.  On what should have been the last out, the umpire blew the call, and said the runner was safe.

Galarraga went on to show himself a true sportsman and a solid gentleman.  Everybody was hollering and booing.  Galarraga just smiled, and smiled, and went back to work, and got the next guy out too.  The umpire, a true professional, and clearly a man to whom this is not just a job, wept over his mistake and apologized personally and publiclly to Galarraga, who responded with continued class.  Everybody handled it about as well as it could be handled.  That Chrysler gave Galleraga a corvette is a nice home town gesture of a bonus.

The only part that has been less than laudible is the decision of Baseball Commissioner Bud Seilig not to reverse the call and award Galarraga what everybody knows he earned.

Now, I understand how important it is for umpires to maintain absolute authority on the field.  Their decisions have to be made in a split second, and they have to stand, or it’s gonna be chaos in what is a high-pressure, high-testosterone situation.  BUT in baseball, the stats are of tremendous importance, to players, to the teams and to the game itself.  The rank was earned.  The umpire himself admitted it, and pretty quickly too.  There’s no question, unlike some other stats recently, whether the pitcher actually earned it.  He did it.  We all saw it (and it was a hell of a game too, including a catch by Austin Jackson that was also one for the books).  Why can’t he have the exclamation point?

Everybody’s done the right thing here.  Everybody but the one guy with the power to set the record straight.

Mr. Seilig should pay closer attention to the umpire’s ultimate call.

I’ve been nominated for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for my story “The Persistence of Souls,” which appears in the Book View Press Anthology, THE SHADOW CONSPIRACY: Tales of the Steam Age Vol. I

Here’s the official announcement from BVC:

Book View Cafe author Sarah Zettel has been nominated for this year’s Sidewise Award for Alternate History for her story “The Persistence of Souls,” published in the exclusive Book View Press collection THE SHADOW CONSPIRACY: Tales of the Steam Age Vol. I .

THE SHADOW CONSPIRACY is a unique, original anthology, created and published exlcusively by the author-members of Book View Cafe.

A collection of stories set on alternative earth, a place powered by steam and magic, THE SHADOW CONSPIRACY takes place in a world of dreamers, experimenters and engineers, soulless humans and ensouled machines was born of most unlikely parents: four poets who gathered one cold summer on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816.  All-new and never-before-seen, these stories explore the unfolding consequences of that gathering — and how it changed everything we thought we knew about science and ourselves.

Zettel’s story, “The Persistence of Souls,” concerns Ada Lovelace, the only legitimate daughter of the mad, bad, dangerous Lord Byron, and the creator of machine language and her own conspiracy with Charles Babbage, inventor of the difference engine, and so much more.

The Sidewise Awards for Alternate History were conceived in late 1995 to honor the best allohistorical genre publications of the year. The first awards were announced in summer 1996 and honored works from 1995. The award takes its name from Murray Leinster’s 1934 short story “Sidewise In Time”, in which a strange storm causes portions of Earth to swap places with their analogs from other timelines.

To be considered, a work must have either first English-language publication or first American publication in the calendar year prior to the year in which the award is to be presented. In other words, awards announced in 1997 honored works published in 1996 and were called the “1996 Sidewise Awards”. Two awards are usually given each year.

To celebrate, Book View Cafe is offering a look at Sarah’s award-nominated story, free for a limited time.   Welcome to the Grand Conspiracy!

Read The Persistence of Souls

Buy THE SHADOW CONSPIRACY  Now – $9.99

Available Formats: PDF, EPUB, Mobi, .prc, .lrf, .lit

Free Romance at Book View Café

Visit Book View Café for your free copy of THE PASSIONATE CAFÉ: http://www.bookviewcafe.com/

I’d heard that a project was afoot for an animated movie based on The Book of Kells, one of the worlds most beautiful illuminated manuscripts, and I was really looking forward to it.  I expected to be impressed, maybe even amazed if I was lucky.

I did not expect to be so utterly charmed.

This is a movie with a kid-accessible plot.  The hero, Brendan, lives with his uncle, an abbot, who is trying to build walls strong enough to withstand the invading North Men.  Brendan is forbidden to go beyond the growing walls.  Enter another monk, Aiden, carrying a beautifully drawn book.  Brendan is fascinated and wants to help in its completion, which he does first by, you got it, heading outside the walls.  The first time it’s for berries to make a particular green ink.  There he meets a magical little girl, and we’re off to the races.  That the moral is that books are stronger than walls comes as no surprise, but the journey is highly enjoyable in the way that Hayao Miyazaki best kids movies are enjoyable.  Italso features one of the best fights with a dragon in movies

But what really, REALLY makes it is the animation.  It’s gorgeously stylized and rich with detail and complexity.  But more than that, the artists play with your perception and expectation to help tell the story, to amuse and delight, but never in a way that distracts from the story-telling.  The visuals enhance and support what’s happening, they fit in with the emotions and wonder of the boy’s discovery and growth, bolster and expand on it in the way a really well-crafted sound track can.

If you can catch this in the theater, do.  Otherwise, it is most definitely worth reserving on your favorite entertainment delivery surface.

I really do.  As a medium, the form is fantastic.  All the power of a Hollywood blockbuster movie with the special effects costs of radio.  Plus, what other medium predicted both spandex and international terrorism?

I grew up on my uncle’s cast off Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig comics, not to mention the movie spoofs and truly weird Don Martin comics in his Mad Magazines.

When I hit college, the world was being turned upside down by the likes of Frank Miller and Grant Morrison, Alan Moore and this new gothy-sort named Neil Gaiman.

Yes, I’m old.  Can we move on now?

The problem is that most comics are so poorly written, especially the dialogue I just can’t deal.  I keep trying, but I end in failure and frustration.

That makes finding something like PS238 that much sweeter.

I’d known about this particular webcomic for awhile, but I’ve only recently had a chance to really sit down with it.  I have two words: it’s fabulous.

The basic premise is that PS238 is a public school for “metaprodigies,” that is, they have superpowers.  Some have super-powered parents, some don’t, some have sort of…showed up from other planets or dimension.  One boy, Tyler, has a pair of super-parents, but no powers of his own.

There’s nothing about this comic I don’t love.  From the portrayal of the teachers and staff, to the characters of the meta-prodigy children, to the plotting, to the humor (the rivalry between the two supervillain kids is particularly hysterical).  The art may be somewhat of a weakness, especially in some of the early issues, but creator Aaron Williams gets mega-major-massive bonus points from me for portraying competent women and girls of all ages and body-types, a genuine rarity in the world of comics.  The plots and dialogue are really well-thought-out and continually entertaining, and he’s surprised me several times and given me some genuine “how are they getting out of this?” moments.

So far, we’ve only bought the first three compilations.  The rest are most definitely on their way.

The one thing we do have control over is the story itself, and that’s the important part, right?  So it’s okay to obsess over it.  In fact, it’s vital to obsess over it.  Every word must be carefully chosen and placed, and it must be rewritten and rewritten until it is perfect, no matter how long it takes.  Right?

Ummm…right.  Up to a point.  At some point you just have to declare it done.  It’ll never be perfect.  Perfection doesn’t exist, especially not for the author because you know where all the seams are and the location of each and every buried body.  The more you rewrite the more seams and buried bodies there are going to be.  You just have to dig deep and say it’s good enough, and let it go.

The inability to stop rewriting is one of the manifestations of the great writing fear; fear of failure.

If you never stop rewriting, you never have to submit the mss. to an editor, and you’ll never get rejected.  It’s nothing more or less than a very active, very busy form of procrastination.  It’s effective too, because it allows the writer to feel like they’re accomplishing something important when what they are really doing is running on a hamster wheel built of ink and pixels.

Another common manifistation of this fear is First Chapter Syndrome.  That’s when the writer can’t seem to get past the first chapter of a project.  They get an idea, they’re enthusiastic, they write the first chapter.  It’s good, and then…then nothing.  Silence.  The next chapter won’t flow.  Logical flaws have been discovered in the plot and characters.  It’s not a good idea after all.  It’s crap.  It’s garbage!  It goes in the trash, literally or metaphorically, abandoned in favor of another idea.

This is another great way to avoid finishing.  If every idea is abandoned, then none of them have to face the judges…erm…editors.  You do all the rejecting yourself and save them the trouble, and yourself the suspense.

The following is a true story.  John W. Campbell, the most famous and influential (and best paying) SF editor of the pulp era was also a great booster of new talent.  He used to go to a lot of SF conventions and talk to a lot of wannabe writers.  At one point a young wannabe came up to him most humbly to talk about writing.  “Have I ever seen any of your work?” asked Campbell.  “Oh no, Mr. Campbell!” replied Wannabe.  “It’s not good enough for you!”  Campbell reared back and said “Young man, how dare YOU reject stories for MY magazine!”

Think about that for a second.  Who are you to do the job of an experienced, and professionally compensated, editor?  Rejection is not the work of a writer.  The work of a writer is to make the idea as good as it can be and get it out the door. Rejection will come soon enough after that.  Why rush?

I’m not saying that to be cruel, or snarky (okay, maybe I’m being just a little snarky).  But the first fear, the big fear, the abiding fear of the working writer is fear of rejection.  I am hugely familiar with this fear.  I’ve got 4 proposals plus 3 mss. out to various editors and it’s sitting on my shoulder right now, giggling in my ear.

Unfortunately, rejection is the price of doing business.  If you want to be a professional author, you are going to get rejected.  You are going to get rejected at the beginning, in the middle and at the end.  I spent the time from 2006 to 2009 being rejected by pretty much every SF house in NYC, and not a few of the romance houses, and then there were the rejections for the graphic novel thrown in for good measure.  On the 10th anniversary of my first rejection slip, I threw a party.  This was back in the day when submissions and rejections were all done on paper.  So I took all my slips and taped them together in a banner and hung it up as the party decoration.  One of my housemates measured it.  In 10 years I had collected 55 1/2 feet of rejection.  I still have that banner, and I’m still getting rejected.

So what’s my advice?

Write.  Read.  Work on your craft as you get the chance and make it as good as you can.  Then — Man up.  Pull on your big girl panties.  Get someone to hold your hand if that’s what it takes (and I have in fact done that).  And send it out.  And while you’re waiting for the answer, start your next project.  It’ll help pass the time, and keep you in practice.

And yes, you’ll get rejected.  And you’ll get rejected.  And you’ll keep getting rejected, until, one day, you don’t.

The fresh-baked blueberry scone to have with a lovely 2nd flush darjeeling tea this afternoon is a complete bonus.